How Trump's mass firing strategy could backfire
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Even those who have long argued that it should be easier to fire federal workers are wary of the way the White House is going about job cuts.
Why it matters: The administration's fire first, ask questions later approach is embroiled in a legal battle that likely winds up at the Supreme Court.
Where it stands: The White House has moved at lightning speed to cut the size of the federal workforce, plowing through longstanding protections meant to insulate civil servants from politics.
- The administration has ignored union contracts, reduction-in-force procedures, and certain guidelines around quasi-independent officials, arguing the president has the right to fire workers.
- It's also simply gutted agencies, driving out many more workers, including this past weekend.
- It's possible that many of those worker protections are "much more fragile than people thought," says John Logan, a professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University.
State of play: Just last week, two federal judges reversed some of these moves, ordering the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers.
- The White House blasted their decisions, and appeals are looming.
- "President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse. This isn't easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it's a task long overdue," Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary at the White House, said in a statement.
The other side: Critics have long argued that it's way too hard to fire government workers, leading to inefficiency and incompetency in the bureaucracy.
- If it's easier to fire workers, "you would have more accountability, less complaints about bad workers holding back teammates or managers who can't control their workforce," says Judge Glock, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
Zoom out: Over the past decades, several states have moved more employees to at-will status, meaning they can be fired easily as in the private sector.
- Some of what the White House has been doing could move the federal government that way, says Glock, who coauthored a recent paper arguing in favor of such reforms. The paper notes such reforms haven't led to more corruption in the states.
- Glock points to the White House executive order that seeks to reclassify civil servants to make them easier to fire under a new Schedule F. "That's certainly in the right direction," he says.
Glock says he doesn't have a strong opinion on other White House moves to push workers out, notably the mass firings of probationary workers, but he cautioned those firings, and other actions, could backfire.
- "If there's a perception that these removals were about getting back at opponents or at hiring only loyalists, then I think that hurts the long term cause of civil service reform," he says.
Between the lines: Whether the White House can break these protections may end up coming down to public sentiment.
- Since the pandemic, Americans have been far more sympathetic toward the plight of workers, and approval ratings for unions have gone up.
- During the last major assault on the federal workforce in the 1980s, there wasn't a lot of sympathy for unionized workers, says Joseph McCartin, a history professor at Georgetown University.
- "Public support is crucial," he says.
